Shoreham air crash: Grandmother who drove through 'fireball' describes horror - as authorities prepare to move wreckage
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Version 0 of 1. A grandmother who drove through the fireball created by the Shoreham air show crash has described the 'apocalyptic' scenes - as authorities prepared to recover the wreckage. Investigators fear up to 20 people have been killed after the 1950s fighter jet, flown by 51-year-old former RAF pilot Andy Hill, hit the A27 near Shoreham in Sussex at 1:20pm on Saturday after a stunt it was performing went wrong. Authorities are looking into concerns around an explosive charge in the ejector seat which they say was only “partially deployed”, according to the BBC. There is still engine fuel on board the aircraft, making the extraction of the Hawker Hunter jet a delicate operation. Vivien Ayling, a grandmother who lives in the area, described the moment she saw the fireball hurtling towards as she drove to work. “I saw it coming towards me, head-on," she told the Sun. "All I thought was, ‘I need to get away fast’. It was all in slow motion, I imagine it’s what an atomic bomb would be like." Driving through the smoke and flames, she stopped to look back at a scene she described as “like an apocalyptic movie”. “It was like the end of the world," she said. "The fire came and smoke surrounded me and I had a few seconds to decide what to do, there was no more time to react. To be honest, I thought about what they do in the movies and I just pressed my foot to the floor. An explosion at the Shoreham Air Show, in Sussex, Britain, 22 August 2015, after a fighter jet crashed Remarkably, after witnessing the crash, she got back into her car and continued her journey to her job at M&S. She said: “I was scared there’d be another explosion and I wanted to get away quickly — so I got back in and went to work.” Mrs Ayling said she called her husband to let him know she was OK and started working on the shop floor around 30 minutes after she arrived: “I wanted to do something normal to calm down.” She described how Mr Hill had tried to save lives as he swerved to avoid crashing onto the road and killing the spectators who had lined the A27. Mr Hill was pulled from the wreckage and is now in a critical condition in hospital. The Civil Aviation Authority said it would be helping the Air Accidents Investigations Branch investigate the disaster after the mother of one of the victims, Matthew Grimstone, told the Daily Telegraph that air shows “should be over the sea. It should never have been over that road.” Additional reporting by PA |